Experience: Evolution of a CAB forum
Peter Thörn
We want to share some experience from a recent assignment one of our consultants made in an organisation running ITIL based service management, where she had an assignment to drive a change management forum, CAB.
Maria's story:
"So what does CAB stand for? It stands for Change Advisory Board and it is a part of the change management process.
The CAB’s main function is to ensure that the requested changes are reviewed and assessed before they get deployed to production to avoid critical incidents and issues.
To make the CAB process a success story instead of a blocker, I believe these are the ingredients you should have:
Few but mandatory and business relevant requirements
Be consistent with the requirements, meaning do not approve anything that does not fulfill your committed CAB requirements
Continuously review the received CAB tasks to meet today´s agile work flow
Do not allow deployment to production without CAB approval signature. This is to make sure that no requests are by-passing the CAB.
In the beginning we used to run the CAB as a physical meeting once a week where received requests were discussed, but very often the requests did not meet the CAB requirements and were instead put on hold, or postponed until next week´s CAB meeting. In worst case, some were approved by management via the escalation process for exceptional approval. This caused a lot of tension and unnecessary conflicts between the different teams and people felt that there is no need to have the CAB if the recommendation is not followed. Since the CAB was becoming a blocker for many requests, we decided to change the CAB process to align it with today’s agile and flexible ways of working.
We cancelled the weekly physical CAB meetings and instead reviewed the requests continuously as they were sent in. If all the CAB requirements were fulfilled, we approved the request immediately and informed the requester within 24 hours or less. In those cases where the request was not complete, we contacted the requester and discussed the missing pieces. Once the additional information had been added, the request was approved. We have only encountered a few requests that has been rejected by the CAB team. This has for example been due to incomplete test documentation.
Today most of the raised requests fulfil the CAB requirements and get approved in a smooth way. From being considered an unnecessary process step with little impact on quality the CAB forum is today an appreciated handshake considered to be effective and supporting of qualitative releases. It's been great fun to help facilitate this change and I've learned a lot!"